The entries of March 17, 1806 capture the Corps of Discovery in the final, restless days before abandoning Fort Clatsop. Three narrators — Sergeant John Ordway, Captain Meriwether Lewis, and Captain William Clark — describe the same cluster of events, but the comparison reveals sharp differences in scope, register, and editorial habit. Lewis and Clark produce nearly identical paragraphs, a textual pattern repeated throughout the winter, while Ordway’s terse log preserves a detail the captains omit and frames the day from the enlisted men’s vantage.
Parallel Captains, Diverging Detail
Lewis and Clark’s entries for this date are textually almost twins. Both open with the identical sentence — “Catel and his family left us this morning. Old Delashelwilt and his women still remain” — and both continue with the same wry observation that the Chinook party had “formed a camp near the fort and seem to be determined to lay close sege to us.” The captains share a confidence in their men’s resolve:
I beleive notwithstanding every effort of their wining graces, the men have preserved their constancy to the vow of celibacy which they made on this occasion to Capt C. and myself.
The shared phrasing confirms the well-documented practice in which one captain copied from the other’s draft, smoothing spelling and capitalization to his own habits. Clark’s version reads “Capt L. and my self,” Lewis’s reads “Capt C. and myself” — the only meaningful variation in the opening passage.
Where the two captains diverge is in subject matter beyond the fort’s daily affairs. Lewis extends his entry into a long natural-history digression on the “pellucid jellylike substance, called the sea-nettle” and on two species of “Fuci or seawreck” cast up along the strand. He describes the first species with the precision of a working naturalist — “a large vesicle or hollow vessell which would contain from one to two gallons, of a conic form” — and credits Clark as the source for information on the second, which Clark himself had observed “on the coast towards the Killamucks.” Clark, by contrast, closes his entry with practical expedition business: a proposition by “one of our interpt and Several of the party to take one in lieu of 6 Elk which they Stole from us this winter.” The division of labor visible elsewhere in the journals — Lewis as botanist and zoologist, Clark as cartographer and logistician — is on display here within entries that otherwise mirror each other.
Ordway’s Independent Voice
Sergeant Ordway’s entry is shorter and stylistically distinct, demonstrating that he wrote from his own observations rather than copying the captains. He opens with the weather and the work — “Snow, we fixed our canoes and git in readiness for a Start” — and frames the canoe transaction from the practical angle of a man who expected to depart that day:
we should have started this day had we been ready.
Ordway also preserves an editorial footnote quoting Lewis on the November visit of Delashelwilt’s party, the same group that “had communicated the venerial to so many of our party.” The captains’ March 17 entries gesture only obliquely at this history through the joke about the men’s “vow of celibacy”; readers who lack the November context would miss the warning embedded in the captains’ levity. Ordway, or his editor, supplies it.
The Price of a Canoe
All three narrators record George Drouillard’s return from the Cathlahmahs with a purchased canoe, but their accounting differs in tone. Ordway notes flatly that Drouillard bought it “for Capt Lewises Uniform coat and a small peace of tobacco.” Lewis turns the same transaction into a meditation on indigenous valuation and a claim against his employer:
nothing excep this coat would induce them to dispose of a canoe which in their mode of traffic is an article of the greatest value except a wife, with whom it is equal, and is generally given in exchange to the father for his daughter. I think the U States are indebted to me another Uniform coat, for that of which I have disposed on this occasion was but little woarn.
Clark echoes the passage almost verbatim, but shifts the claim into the third person and sharpens its legal flavor: “I think that the United States are injustice indebted to Captn Lewis another uniform Coat.” The small grammatical change — Lewis advocating for himself, Clark advocating for his partner — is characteristic of the captains’ collaborative authorship. Read together with Ordway’s bare ledger entry, the captains’ parallel paragraphs show how a routine quartermaster’s expense became, in the official journal, an ethnographic note on Chinookan exchange and a reimbursement request to the War Department.
